"You Better Be Jewish"
The first in a series of love letters to free speech
Dear readers: I try to make most posts free, especially if they are useful for liberals to send to other liberals. Occasionally, I put things behind a paywall. Sometimes people tell me that they don’t pay because not enough of my stuff is paywalled. Others get deeply offended when anything is behind one and abandon their free subscriptions. All this is to say: This is a paywalled post, and if you can’t afford a subscription, ping me and I’ll give you one for free.
Yesterday, I came out of the tiny phone room where I’d been conducting an interview, into the shared kitchen of the co-working space I’ve been using. The interviewee and I had spent an hour talking mostly about—you guessed it—gender stuff, some of which would likely be considered offensive or distasteful by my fellow co-working members, here in lefty land where I live. At the very end of our talk, I made a comment about some people I’ve interviewed who’ve given me good ideas for titles and subtitles, including the person I was talking to. I described them both as “short Jewish guys.” That’s a neutral description, as far as I see it. Some of the people I’ve interviewed are lanky Catholic fellas—conservatives at that! I don’t think they’d be offended if I described them as such.
I stepped out of the booth, where I’d been having this private call, and a woman was standing there with her arms crossed. She looked not that different from me: middle-aged, possibly of Eastern European descent. She told me that she’d overheard me use the term “short Jewish guy” and that I better be Jewish; otherwise she was going to be offended.